


The Place Where It's Always "And"

by moon_custafer



Category: Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Genre: 1970s, Afterlife, Gen, it’s like Capra but they can say “fuck”, period-typical smoking, ‘Nam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 12:46:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_custafer/pseuds/moon_custafer
Summary: “Cole and the other guys had talked, sometimes, about what they thought happened after you died. Slivko had said there wasn’t anything, just fade to black, and Mills like the good Baptist boy he was had sworn you met Jesus and he took you to Heaven. Cole had figured it depended on the person, like, not just whether you’d been good or bad, but what you believed and expected to see.”





	The Place Where It's Always "And"

Cole thinks about how time moves differently on This Side, or maybe it just feels like it does.

When he’d first woken up dead, on top of the cliff he’d smashed into just before he’d got blown up? It had felt like a hundred years had passed since his epic fuck-up with the momma skull-crawler— but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds because there she had been, still half-slithering after everybody. He’d heard Mills howling, and it had felt like a knife to his heart—metaphorically anyway: he’d just been blown up, and there was no way he’d ever know what a knife in him felt like now, was there?

He’d screamed too, in all his grief and anger and frustration, but of course the living couldn’t hear him.

And then Kong had come out of the mountains and wrestled that giant bony bitch and bought them all the escape time Cole’s death hadn’t been able to. Cole had laughed, and then he’d felt bad in the gut because if the big monkey was still alive then the Colonel almost certainly wasn’t, and then he’d been mad at himself all over again because if he hadn’t tried to be such a goddamned hero he could’ve been escaping with the rest of them. After that he’d looked around, wondering if he was going to have to haunt this mountain as a ghost or something, and that’s when he noticed the old lady with writing on her face.

She must’ve been one of those Iwi people crazy Marlow had talked about. Cole never knew how long she’d been watching him, or whether she was dead or living— Marlow had said something about how the Iwi stopped aging after a while and had memories that were centuries long, and maybe some of ‘em just never died, or got to a point where there wasn’t any difference between That Side and This Side.

Because the old lady could definitely see Cole. She didn’t smile and she didn’t say anything, she just pointed, and when he looked where she was pointing there was a door, and when he walked through that door— he’d found himself in a waiting room. Like, a totally ordinary one, looked like it could be in some building back stateside.

Cole and the other guys had talked, sometimes, about what they thought happened after you died. Slivko had said there wasn’t anything, just fade to black, and Mills like the good Baptist boy he was had sworn you met Jesus and he took you to Heaven. Cole had figured it depended on the person, like, not just whether you’d been good or bad, but what you believed and expected to see. He hadn’t been sure what just what he expected himself, but looking around that room, he figured his mind was playing tricks to keep from going crazy— like, he wasn’t really in a waiting room, he was in some kind of other dimension entirely, staffed with angels that probably looked like blazing acid visions; but his mind was interpreting it as a green-walled government office or hospital building because that was the only way it could understand what was happening without giving itself a sprain.

And then, he’d been called into an office where a lady shrink had asked him if he knew where he was. He’d told her she could give it to him straight: he knew he was bound for Hell, because he’d killed a lot of people and even if some of them had been trying to kill him or the other guys at the time, he’d realized after a few months that it was mostly because their villages had been invaded, but he hadn’t deserted. And he’d followed the Colonel’s orders almost to the end, when the Colonel’d gone crazy and tried to kill a giant ape-god instead of getting them all off the island. And when you’re dead, you don’t have any more excuses. And then he’d wondered again about the Colonel, and asked where _he _was. Maybe they could share a fiery pit, and some of the other guys would be there too; and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, then.

And the shrink had smiled, like they do, except in her case Cole believed it; and she’d asked him if he wouldn’t rather atone for his mistakes than be damned for eternity. Cole had agreed that yeah, that sounded like a much better deal. He could tell she didn’t want to talk about the Colonel. She'd written something down in a notebook, and had taken Cole to meet a guy named Gene, who would show him the ropes, she said. He’d been an army medic, a tall, skinny black man who'd survived two tours of duty only to slip and bust his head on some cement steps in his own home town of Philadelphia.

“All that time in South Asia,” he'd joked; “guess I forgot sidewalks could ice up.” Cole had decided pretty quickly Gene didn’t really have anything to atone for, he’d just wanted to keep on helping out.

“You hungry, man?” he’d asked, right after shaking Cole’s hand. “There’s a place round the corner has the best pho.” Then in answer to the stupid surprised expression Cole’s face must’ve made when he realized that yeah, he _was_ hungry, even though he was dead, Gene had grinned and explained: “We work with the living--- so for us this place is still a lot like Earth. Only a little less shitty,” he’d added, as they walked down a street that was San Francisco and Saigon and New York and Philadelphia and Athens, Georgia all mixed together. “And yeah, that also means people here can have sex. ‘Course you still gotta find somebody that wants to go to bed with you; but in my experience, everyone’s a lot more willing when there ain’t no VDs to worry about.”

He was right about the pho, it was amazing.

Later, Gene showed him just what the job he'd signed onto involved; and that’s when Cole started to wonder if he was going to be able to hack it, because it was mostly just _watching_— watching people try and fuck up and try again, and only sometimes you were allowed to give them a little nudge, a little hint, a little pat on the shoulder to comfort them. They couldn’t see you, for one thing; and they were supposed to make their own choices, for another.

Cole keeps hoping he’ll get a mission that lets him look in on his mother, or on Mills, who he hopes is safely back in Key West by now. Cole isn’t sure how long he’s been dead— he’s been going back to Earth as an angel, kind of, for a hundred years, only that’s a hundred years _parallel_, not in sequence. In human time? Living time? Might only be a week, or a month. Every time he's on That Side, the calendars still say 1973.

It’s tough; but in between missions the food is good and so is the beer, and even the coffee is half-decent when they have it at their briefings and debriefings, which a lot of the time are more like group therapy. Besides Gene, there are some people Cole knows, including poor Chapman, who’ll never finish that letter to Billy now; and Cole’s cousin Ethan who was hit by a souped-up ’39 Ford the year after they both graduated high school; and also Maureen Applegate from math class who’d died of appendicitis in their final year, only Cole knows now it was really because of a botched abortion and her family just made up the story about the appendicitis so there wouldn't be a scandal. And there are other people Cole never knew alive: Dave and Lac-Hong and Aline and Ishiro and Honey and Awero. Nobody gets missions that take them too close to their own loved ones. Might be compromising, Cole guesses.

And Cole has his own room, with walls and ceiling and bookshelves all painted haint blue; and there’s a little record player like Slivko’s, and some Sam Cooke records; and on the bed is the quilt his grandma made him, all worn thin and soft and smelling like home; and some of Mason’s photos are framed on the wall. He wonders how her photos can exist on This Side when she’s still alive, but maybe pictures exist in both worlds. Cole seems to have ended up in the place where it’s always “_and_,” not “if” or “but.”

He still wonders about the Colonel. He can’t talk to Chapman about it, because Chapman died before the Colonel did: that was maybe the final straw that broke the Colonel's sanity, and the poor guy doesn't need anything more weighing on him.

Maureen and Lac-Hong are holding hands in the debriefing. Cole thinks it’s cute, and also something of a relief, because even though he’d been sweet on Maureen when they were in math class together, they’d both been seventeen at the time; and she still is, but he sure as hell ain’t. These days it’d be creepy if she said anything about how he used to blush if, collecting papers after a test, their hands accidentally touched. Maybe she never even noticed how he blushed. Given how she died, she probably had other things on her mind back then. But whatever’s going on between her and Lac-Hong seems to make her happy, even when everybody in the group’s had one of those missions when the people they watch just can’t be helped.

It’s after just one such mission that Cole finally works up the nerve to ask Gene if he knows anything about the Colonel. They’re eating baked potatoes and walking along a street with Mongolian yurts on one side and two- or three-story shopfronts on the other. It’s weird, yet somehow familiar, like everything else on This Side. The rain’s just stopped. The rain has always just stopped. It's a meteorological mystery how that works.

“Gene my man? If this is... well, whatever this is— what’s Hell like?”

The medic stops in his tracks, and Cole worries for a sec that’s he’s killed the vibe; but the cat’s just folding up the tin foil from his finished baked potato and carefully putting it in his pocket before taking out a cigarette. Cole hands him his own piece of foil, and Gene gravely accepts it and folds it away. Cole wonders sometimes what he does with all the leftover foil, but that’s not what’s on his mind now:

“Worried about someone?” Gene asks.

“My old commander. I don’t even for sure know he’s dead, but he wasn’t in a good place, last time I saw him.” Understatement of the decade. Gene lights up his cigarette and takes a long drag.

“Despite what they say back on Earth,” he finally says, “there’s not as many people as you’d think get sent to Hell. But there’s a lot who send themselves there, can’t be talked out of it.”

“That sounds like the Colonel. Is there... someplace you can look up where everybody is? Like, I dunno, like a phone book?”

Gene smiles at that:

“You wanna call up somebody in Hell? Brother, you are in for some _painful_ long-distance charges.” Growing serious, he adds: “Yeah, you can ask at the office where you came through, back when you first got here.”

“Tried asking my caseworker at the time,” says Cole, scratching his head. “Got the idea she didn’t want to discuss him.”

“That probably means he is. In Hell, I mean. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just— he wasn’t all bad. We trusted him, and he never did us wrong. Kept us alive, until the one time he couldn’t, and that’s when he got all— he just wanted some payback, y’know? And then he kind of lost sight of everything else.”

Gene sighs.

“You see that sometimes. I mean, in our job we see it _all_ the time. Hard enough to pull someone out of that nosedive while they’re still alive. Even harder afterwards, because here there’s no bottom for them to hit. You do have two things going for you,” he adds. “First, if your Colonel’s on This Side, you can talk to him directly; and second, you really do have _all_ the time in the world to try and talk him out of it.”

Cole feels scared at what it seems Gene’s suggesting he do; and then he thinks of Mills, writing his mom every week even though she hardly ever wrote back. He used to tell Mills not to waste his time, but maybe she appreciated the letters and just couldn’t write that well. Maybe Mills needed to write the letters, whether they got read or not.

”That office-- how late does it stay open?” he asks, though he can guess the answer already:

“Man, they _never _close.”


End file.
